An Edible Rainbow Of Colorful Products

September 10, 1987|By Trish Hall, New York Times

NEW YORK — When Andrew D'Amico cooked for a party of Mobil Corp. executives, he served purple potatoes. ''There were a lot of weird comments,'' said D'Amico, the executive chef at the Sign of the Dove in Manhattan. ''The first thing people think is that the potatoes have been shot full of chemicals.''

But purple potatoes, grown in Peru for years and now available in the United States, are natural, as natural as white carrots, yellow tomatoes, gold beets, red bananas, yellow cherries, red spinach, golden raspberries, purple peppers, bronze fennel and red chard. Because old varieties of fruits and vegetables have been rediscovered and new varieties have been developed, Americans can now find food in colors to suit any mood. The edible rainbow is startling in a country that 20 years ago stuck mostly to beige, white and brown, with an occasional green or yellow in a reluctant nod to nutrition.

Funny-colored foods are showing up mostly in restaurants in New York and California that must constantly reinvent themselves to keep customers entertained. ''People always want something new,'' said Alain Quirin, the chef at Raoul's, a French bistro in SoHo. ''It is more interesting to talk about a red banana than a regular banana.''

Like the baby vegetables before them, the oddly colored varieties may be a subtle way to show off. ''These might be foods for the elite to eat,'' said Nan Rothschild, an anthropology professor at Barnard College. Before freezers were widespread, she said, the rich could exhibit their status by eating ice cream. Now, they can serve lavender corn on the cob.

Purveyors of produce to restaurants and fancy grocery stores say they are selling an ever-growing array of produce in unusual colors. Yellow seems especially popular. In fact, the demand for yellow tomatoes exceeds the supply, according to Joey Weiss, the president of Northern Produce-Mushrooms Inc. in Los Angeles.

''It's a white strawberry the size of your baby fingernail, if you don't bite it,'' said Walter Martin, a managing director. The company's sales of foods in which color is a big factor have grown by about 50 percent in the last three years, he said, to about $2 million a year, or almost a third of the company's annual revenue. Seeds for some of the unusual varieties are supplied by Le Marche Seeds International in Dixon, Calif., a five-year-old company whose business has doubled every year, with sales of $250,000 anticipated this year. It offers 33 varieties of lettuce -- but no iceberg. The company had purple potatoes last year, and ''we sold out of everything we had,'' said Georgeanne Brennan-Schrupp, a co-owner. ''People were crazy about them. It was the novelty of it, the mystique.''

This year, the company is offering eggplant with lavender and cream stripes, red and white striped beets, chartreuse broccoli, red chard, blue corn and red pumpkins. More novel seeds are on the way; Le Marche hopes to have red corn from Mexico in the summer of 1988.

Not every strange color finds takers. ''Right now we have red spinach,'' said Gary Feldman, a partner in Bink & Bink, a Manhattan broker that sells specialties like blue potatoes, red mustard greens, white tomatoes and Lola Rosa, a crinkly green lettuce with bright red tips. He sent the spinach to some chefs, but ''they're not jumping up and down wild about it,'' Feldman said.

Why not? ''You couldn't cook with it,'' said Anthony Damiano, the executive chef at Shearson Lehman Brothers. The color bled and turned sauces pink, he said, adding, however, that he liked the spinach in salads.

Cathie Maiello of Lloyd Harbor Greens Inc. on Long Island has also faced resistance. ''I had white baby carrots,'' she said. ''I couldn't give them away.'' This year, kohlrabi comes in both purple and white, and, she said, ''I'm having a little trouble with the purple.'' But yellow tomatoes and golden raspberries sell themselves, and she is also offering red mustard greens, bronze fennel and white cherries.

The varied colors help chefs create eye-catching dishes. ''People are eating less quantity,'' Maiello said. ''You have to give them something else to make them happy. So you give them the visual, the picture.''

Jan Blum, of Idaho's Seeds Blum, which sells unusual seeds, said many of the seemingly strange foods were not always rare. ''I have a seed catalog from 1870,'' she said, ''and it lists purple cauliflower and green cauliflower, but no white. Purple has been around for thousands of years.''